The New York Times kicked off the smear campaign against President Donald Trump just four weeks into his presidency.

At a Feb. 17 press conference, a reporter from an Orthodox Jewish publication told the president, “What we are concerned about and what we haven’t really heard being addressed is an uptick in anti-Semitism and how the government is planning to take care of it.”

Although the reporter did not mean to blame the president, Trump heard it that way given the attacks made against him and his campaign for the previous year or so.

That was answer enough to set off the Times. Its story on the encounter rehashed charges that Trump was soft on the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke and white supremacists.

On Feb. 21, Trump publicly denounced anti-Semitic threats, but that gave the Times another excuse to insinuate that since his campaign drew the “drew the support of racist and anti-Semitic groups,” he was “willing to stay silent about such actions” if not “quietly condoning them.”

A McClatchy article from that same day was even more insulting. Said the reporter, “Trump counted anti-Semites among his supporters, and his aides occasionally employed veiled anti-Semitic messages.”

In the body of the article, the Times upped the ante. Bomb threats and vandalism, the article continues, “stoked fears that a virulent anti-Semitism has increasingly taken hold in the early days of the Trump administration.”

Now, the problem is sourced not just to the “Trump era” but the “Trump administration” and not just by McClatchy but by the New York Times.

Then on March 3, Juan Thompson was arrested in St. Louis, Missouri, for his involvement in half a dozen bomb threats against Jewish community centers.

Thompson had most recently written for the hard left publication Intercept. Thompson’s Twitter account is laced with anti-Semitic and racist tweets. “Make no mistake,” he tweeted on Feb. 23, “#Chicago’s southside is about to be ethnically cleansed.”

This cleansing he attributed to Donald Trump and his friends in the white establishment. In another tweet, Thompson, who is black, writes “42% of Americans are filthy fascist appeasers and they should be taken out along with Trump.”

In another tweet, Thompson talks about a recent visit to Senegal and say’s he is “reverting” to Islam. The Times reported Thompson’s arrest but made no mention of his leftist politics or his racism, let alone his reversion to Islam.

On March 23, in what the Times described as “an unusual twist,” Israeli police arrested a Jewish teenager with dual American-Israeli citizenship as the “primary” suspect in the bomb threats made against Jewish facilities throughout the world, including the United States.

The kid’s lawyer said he had a brain tumor, which is as good an alibi as any. Although the youth’s name was not released, authorities did say he had no allegiance to any right-wing political or religious groups in Israel.

The Times used the occasion of the teen’s arrest not to apologize to Trump but to reiterate the charges against him, citing the long since discredited Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Project among other disappointed race-baiters.

“We hope our elected officials will directly confront the wave of hate violence that we’ve seen since the election,” said the SPLC’s Heidi Beirich.

What wave? The one ongoing threat Jews face in America is on its campuses from Islamic students groups and their allies.

A recent study by the AMCHA Initiative found that there were nearly 100 more anti-Semitic incidents in the first six months of 2016 compared with the same time period in 2015, that incidents involving suppression of Jewish students’ freedom of speech and assembly doubled during that period, and that the anti-Israel activities “were strongly linked to a surge in anti-Semitic activity.”

As has become abundantly clear, the Times and other media are interested in “hate” only to the degree that they can use it to bash the right, fairly or, more often than not, otherwise.